Is there a good way to take control on the full actionbar real estate?

a simple example of what I'd like to do is to have a bitmap title aligned to the center/middle and in some views have a couple of buttons apear either aligned left/right or next to each other on the right.

Sounds like you'll need a custom skin to replace the existing background FXG and color gradient. If you subclass ActionBarSkin, you can add an Image/BitmapImage/FXG in createChildren() then size it to fit in layoutContents(). You'll also want to override drawBackground() to do nothing.